US Marines on Facebook today were applauding the owner of this shield which bears the marks of most of a magazine of AK-47 rounds and a fair amount of suicide vest shrapnel.(picture source: iTele French TV)

In an interview with ABC News, the head of Interpol admitted that, in an era of terrorist attacks on civilian target, the notion of a governmental monopoly of force doesn’t really deliver an effective defense in time. What does result in a timely response is an armed civilian population capable of self-defense.

Interpol Secretary General Ronald Noble said today the U.S. and the rest of the democratic world is at a security crossroads in the wake of last month’s deadly al-Shabab attack at a shopping mall in Nairobi, Kenya – and suggested an answer could be in arming civilians.

In an exclusive interview with ABC News, Noble said there are really only two choices for protecting open societies from attacks like the one on Westgate mall where so-called “soft targets” are hit: either create secure perimeters around the locations or allow civilians to carry their own guns to protect themselves.

“Societies have to think about how they’re going to approach the problem,” Noble said. “One is to say we want an armed citizenry; you can see the reason for that. Another is to say the enclaves are so secure that in order to get into the soft target you’re going to have to pass through extraordinary security.” …

Citing a recent call for al Qaeda “brothers to strike soft targets, to do it in small groups,” Noble said law enforcement is now facing a daunting task.

“How do you protect soft targets? That’s really the challenge. You can’t have armed police forces everywhere,” he told reporters. “It’s Interpol’s view that one way you protect soft targets is you make it more difficult for terrorist to move internationally. So what we’re trying to do is to establish a way for countries … to screen passports, which are a terrorist’s best friend, try to limit terrorists moving from country to country. And also, that we’re able to share more info about suspected terrorists.”

In the interview with ABC News, Noble was more blunt and directed his comments to his home country.

“Ask yourself: If that was Denver, Col., if that was Texas, would those guys have been able to spend hours, days, shooting people randomly?” Noble said, referring to states with pro-gun traditions. “What I’m saying is it makes police around the world question their views on gun control. It makes citizens question their views on gun control. You have to ask yourself, ‘Is an armed citizenry more necessary now than it was in the past with an evolving threat of terrorism?’ This is something that has to be discussed.”

“For me it’s a profound question,” he continued. “People are quick to say ‘gun control, people shouldn’t be armed,’ etc., etc. I think they have to ask themselves: ‘Where would you have wanted to be? In a city where there was gun control and no citizens armed if you’re in a Westgate mall, or in a place like Denver or Texas?'”

Claire Berlinski reports that graffitists in Paris have responded to the attacks by painting on walls the city’s medieval Latin motto.

This phrase is the motto of Paris. It means, roughly, “tossed by the waves, but not sunk.” You can see it in the city’s coat of arms. It derives from theCoat of Arms 5 Seine boatsman’s corporation, the Marchands de l’eau. They were a Middle Ages hanse, an organization of merchants (as in the Hanseatic League), organized in 1170 to control all trade conducted on the Seine River. Its jurisdiction was — in principle — limited to commerce, but you know how these things go; they became powerful enough to organize a whole city government outside the reach of the French crown. An uprising in 1383 forced them to disband, and they never regrouped. But Paris has been well and truly fluctuat since then, nec mergitur.

I like the slogan for a few reasons, but among them is the message: We’ve been around since the Romans. You’ve been a caliphate since June 29, 2014, we believe?

Read the whole thing.

Hat tip to Ratak Monodosico.

Via Clarice “Final Jeopardy” Feldman.

“March of Resilience” at Yale

Ross Douthat obviously does not agree with the crybullying of today’s radicalized college students, but he recognizes that it was the same academic establishment they are insulting and revolting against which made the corrupt bargain with the revolutionary left that is responsible for the presence of the toxins within the national educational system which produced the current infatuated mobs howling at their doors. There are the crazed students, heads full of Marxist agitprop, filled with passionate intensity confronting the empty-headed and empty-hearted liberals who never believed there could be such a thing as an enemy to the left.

The protesters at Yale and Missouri and a longer list of schools stand accused of being spoiled, silly, self-dramatizing — and many of them are. But they’re also dealing with a university system that’s genuinely corrupt, and that’s long relied on rote appeals to the activists’ own left-wing pieties to cloak its utter lack of higher purpose.

And within this system, the contemporary college student is actually a strange blend of the pampered and the exploited.

This is true of the college football recruit who’s a god on campus but also an unpaid cog in a lucrative football franchise that has a public college vestigially attached.

It’s true of the liberal arts student who’s saddled with absurd debts to pay for an education that doesn’t even try to pass along any version of Matthew Arnold’s “ best which has been thought and said,” and often just induces mental breakdowns in the pursuit of worldly success.

It’s true of the working class or minority student who’s expected to lend a patina of diversity to a campus organized to deliver good times to rich kids whose parents pay full freight. And then it’s true of the rich girl who discovers the same university that promised her a carefree Rumspringa (justified on high feminist principle, of course) doesn’t want to hear a word about what happened to her at that frat party over the weekend.

The protesters may be obnoxious enemies of free debate, in other words, but they aren’t wrong to smell the rot around them. And they’re vindicated every time they push and an administrator caves: It’s proof that they have a monopoly on moral spine, and that any small-l liberal alternative is simply hollow.

Or as the great Walter Sobchak might have put it: “Say what you want about the tenets of political correctness, Dude, at least it’s an ethos.”

Which might turn out to be the only epitaph for the modern university anybody needs to write.

On a Ricochet podcast (requires subscription), Rob Long captures the current situation on campus in a nutshell: “It’s like the Barney the Dinosaur version of Orwell.”

Hat tip to Tim of Angle.

At 3:40, Obama says: “I don’t want to speculate at this point in terms of who was responsible for this…”

As soopermexican puts it: “Obama of course, came out and said that he can’t speculate on who attacked Paris tonight, because it could be Global Warming, or the Amish, after all.”

Damn those Amish!

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* Wikipedia

A crowd of student demonstrators dropped by Yale President Salovey’s house on Hillhouse Avenue late on Thursday with a few modest demands.

Yale Daily News:

At close to midnight on Thursday night, roughly 200 students marched to University President Peter Salovey’s home on Hillhouse Avenue under a new name — Next Yale — wielding a new set of demands.

The students said the new movement will hold Yale accountable to its students of color and that a diverse coalition of students crafted the new demands. …

Salovey told the News that University leaders will “seriously” review the new set of demands and reiterated that a response to them will be issued next week.

Salovey said he considers the manner by which the students delivered the demands entirely acceptable and in compliance with University policy.

“This was a peaceful group of students visiting me at my home at a somewhat late hour, completely consistent with University protest policy,” he said.

Next Yale’s six demands each involved several parts. The first, which focuses on ethnic studies, demands that all Yale undergraduates be required to fulfill an ethnic studies distributional requirement and that the Ethnicity, Race and Migration Program be given departmental status immediately.

The second demand centered on mental health services, a topic that has been prominent in campus discussions and forums over the past two weeks. Next Yale calls for the University to hire mental health professionals in each of the four cultural centers, as well as increased mental health professionals of color at Yale Mental Health and Counseling.

Another demand asked for an increase of $2 million to the current annual operating budget of each cultural center, as well as five full-time staff members for each.

The students also demanded that Calhoun College be renamed and that the two new residential colleges be named after people of color. Under this demand, they also asked for the abolishment of the title “master” and the building of a monument on Cross Campus to acknowledge that Yale was founded on stolen indigenous land.

After the gathering, Salovey told the News that decisions about renaming and naming residential colleges fall under the domain of the Yale Corporation, the governing board and policy-making body for Yale.

The fifth demand, directly addressing recent racial controversies on campus, called for the removal of Nicholas and Erika Christakis from their administrative positions. The final demand focused on allocating resources to support the physical well-being of international, first-generation, low-income and undocumented students.

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Robert Long, at Ricochet, looks on the bright side of all this.

At Yale, a group of students has exploited their overseers’ weak and pathetic need to appear “inclusive” and “nurturing” and “safe.” We’ve all seen the pictures: thoughtful and intellectually accomplished professors and administrators begging their charges for forgiveness, covering themselves in shame and remorse, confessing to all sorts of crimes and shortcomings. …

[P]retty impressive for a group of students at one of the most elite universities in the world. Think of the exams they’ve been able to get cancelled! Think of the late term papers that won’t be penalized!

Let’s total up the life skills on display here: 1. brilliant use of financial leverage; 2. exploiting an opponent’s weakness and cowardice; 3. remorselessly demanding that heads roll; 4. and here’s the best one: Doing it all on someone else’s dime!

I don’t know about you, but those seem like some pretty impressive life and business skills. I don’t know about you, but if I were a college recruiter from, say, Goldman Sachs, I’d have to say that these are exactly the skills I’m looking for.

Economics, financial statistics, that sort of thing you can learn in a webinar. But an instinct for blood and power? That’s some powerful innate stuff right there.

My advice? Hire those brats. Hire them at Goldman and JP Morgan Chase and Cravath. Pay them really well the first year in order to get them hooked on being members of the power elite — there’s nothing that shakes off progressive ideology like a fat end-of-year bonus — and watch those killer instincts go into motion.

Just make sure to stay on their good side. You wouldn’t like to see them angry.

Aux armes, citoyens,
Formez vos bataillons,
Marchons, marchons !
Qu’un sang impur
Abreuve nos sillons !

To arms, citizens,
Form your battallions,
March on, March on !
Let impure blood
Water our furrows !